What I Learned

I won’t guarantee this will happen every week, but on a somewhat regular basis I intend to share some of the things that I’ve recently learned in my studies.

I watched the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet and read the original play. It really helped to watch and read concurrently. I’d watch an hour of the play, then read up to that scene in the play, and so forth. David Tennant’s performance as Hamlet really helped me understand his character, I think he did a fantastic job. Some of the mad and just quirky things he does in the play make far more sense seeing a frenetic and crazed Tennant in the role. I still don’t get Ophelia’s character…she doesn’t make any sense to me and doesn’t seem like a compelling character at all. Unfortunately, watching the performance did not help there at all. But Patrick Stewart was amazing as Hamlet’s father (as a ghost) and uncle. Also, an interesting fact about Hamlet…I didn’t realize this wasn’t an original story. Apparently the plot of Hamlet dates back centuries before Shakespeare, and there was even another play from the 1500’s with a similar storyline. So Shakespeare basically took a popular story and created his own play from it.

I also survived the first week of my Intro to Chemistry course. While I love learning about chemistry, I’ve always been intimidated by having to do chemistry problems, especially those involving math. But I successfully passed the first exam, and somehow got all the math questions right. Besides some review of scientific notation and significant figures (which I had completely forgotten from high school) the first week had mostly familiar content. I did get a better idea of the Scientific Method, which I posted about last week.

In The Interwar Years class we talked about the last battles of World War I and the beginning of the Paris Peace. I reread Murray Rothbard’s book, War Collectivism, which I would highly recommend! It is an excellent overview of the shifting political situation that occurred in the early 20th century. I also read about Mises’ involvement in WWI, which I had not really been aware of. I’m more familiar with his later career, his flight from Germany and new life in America, but I didn’t know much about his time in the military and how that impacted his perspective.

So this week I have more Hamlet, more chemistry, more history, and just a little reading…